Tuesday, March 23, 2004

ARMAGEDDON, INTERRUPTED
As posted before, I am the one with the most experience with our lackluster accounting software at work these days. But even the valiant fall. We have this annual thing called early buy. Simply put, we stock up on stuff at a discounted price and get hella-terms.
It's all on one purchase order, you can't pay on it till it's added to the system, you can't add it to the system until you receive everything on the PO... The first payment came due before 4 items were received.
THE MISSION:
Delete these four items and place them on a new purchase order, add the original PO to the system so the folks upstairs can cut a check.Save,print,close...cigarette break.
Simple enough right?
What did I do? I deleted the PO...POOF! Gone...never to return. 22 pages of product line items on the suppliers pick ticket, 8 pages of tiny font line items on our "system".
We're talking 35,000 dollars worth of merchandise that we have lost the ability to account for because I hit the wrong key...there is no prompt for delete in this software. The designer must have been suicidal and subliminated it through a lack of failsafe prompts like "are you sure you want to delete this record, or did you just fumble on the keyboard"?
The owner of the company was sitting 15 feet to my left when this happened...The owner,my boss,my friend, watched me flush a shitload of accounting info with the ease of a keystroke.
Time for a few words about my warehouse counterpart. He's older...in that 55-60 demo. He's from Waco. He's a hippy. He is totally freaked by technology, push button phones throw him into a panic. That he can do what he does on the computer with the shit we have to work with is nothing short of a miracle.
But more than that, he is a kindred spirit, we have each others back.
He was standing next to me when I aborted the early buy records...he saw the window that said "deleting files". He said "what was that"? or "what happened"?
I said, "I just deleted the early buy PO".
He punched me in the arm several times, cackeling and said "you're as bad as me"!
15 feet away from our boss,watching us, no, me , intently, to see what I would do.
I prevailed in the end, I was saved by the fact that we had not done "system" maintenance yet. An angel named Karen walked me through the restorative process over the phone and, as if by magic I am king of the software again...
fuck....
Service first indeed.